We have now reached the end. I have but one more thing to go over, then all will be finished. Setting your story. How to bring to life all that you have learned. Your characters, your plot, even your dialouge, are all inherently interconnected with your setting. So how do you make everything come to life? Well, this happens to be the best aspect of my writing.

Take my last article, I talked over descriptions within a story's set of parameters. Well now is the time to put those to the test. Now you have to tell those who read the story the hardest part of all. What all those places of your mind really look like. Bring out the aspect of writing setting by introducing to your readers the sights, the sounds, the very smell of the place in which you are taking them. Take this example from my story, Cry of Echoes:

"Beams of golden-green energy cut through buildings like blocks of ice. They carved up the surface of the planet into unrecognizable heaps of burnt dirt creating spirals of dust and smoke that drifted toward the clouds as if the planet itself yearned to protect itself and attack those that were hurting it. Photon torpedoes smashed into the seas, boiling the waters, and careened through the crust, creating geysers of firy magma from just underneath the surface. The Earth herself was bleeding along with those who lived upon her."

With the use of vivid words you can bring alive the look of a place, in my example, the "boiling waters" and "geysers of firey magma" these all create a look that this is a horrific world you would not want to be upon right now.

That brings about the next point of writing in the setting. Creating a tone and feeling for your characters to live in. Obviously any characters in my example would be in a hellish type of area and so they would be running for their lives, etc. But if characters are placed in my next example, the tone changes so completely and you can feel that they are much more at ease seeing things from a distance. Of course, in space, its hard to get a feel for setting, so you can focus more on the detail aspect of descriptions in terms of the ships, as they are your only link to the characters. Here is another example from my story:

"Hawk-like in design, the ships forward facing 'beak' melded seamlessly into the upper 'wing' of the ship. Curving downward from the top, the wing attached to the top of the two pulsing blue nacelles. Like the top, a bottom 'wing' curved upward to attach to the underside of the nacelles. Between the wings, and to both sides of the beak, open space showed through. Equivalent to two Sovereign class ships in size, the Romulan ships matched to the Nelson in firepower."

By just describing the ship sitting in space and its relation to the Nelson, you include within the aspect of setting, as even long (what I call pan shots of writing) are not trulythe "set" per se, they are in fact just that as long as you stay outside, and thus are quite important to the tone of a story. Here, the tone is much more tentative and suspenseful than my first one in which I have a full out horrorific attack. By setting these tones as well, we can use them to influence the characters.

Now of course, setting can be as minimal or as much as you desire, in fact, I usually focus more on the characters and dialoge then in describing a place, but I go with the assumption that by now most of my readers will have had knowledge of the things I talk about, all I have to say is my characters are on the bridge of a Prometheus class ship and they will know what I am talking about. BUT, and this is a huge but, if you ever write a full novel, you NEED, in fact you MUST describe all the detail you can, so as to bring in a greater audience for your story.

Also, in my case, I have entirely new ships to explore. While you don't want to overload a person with detail, through the course of what I hope to take my story into book form, I will go on to describe in some detail the look of the new R'Tanga ship's bridges, so everyone knows the look of where my bad guy is. In terms of characters then, the shaping of setting is very important, as it can actually tell you whether a character is good, bad, insane, etc. Really its true!

So as you can tell by now, the Setting of a story really is the second most integral part of any writing, as it sets the tone, shows the worlds of imagination waiting to be explored, and also makes (or breaks down) the characters within its embrace. Viva La Setting it seems.

Well now, as all good things must, I have to end this series with a fond farewell, and a bittersweetness as I have to now really find some good things to keep writing on :)

I now leave it to your vivid imaginations and wonderful skills to help me make my job better. Good luck in all your writing, and never hesitate to send questions or new stories to me at otf_writersguild@hotmail.com

May your brains be sharp and your fingers nimble all!

CL4 MTabek
Guildmaster - Writer's Guild